Notes

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Legion Lost #12 Review

And then there's this thing.

What Happened That You Have to Know About: Another Legionnaire has a secret revealed (Gates: the Lost Legionnaires are all going to die!). The Legionnaires fight Alastor and also Metamerican and his guys as Alastor possesses many characters in turn. Eventually Wildfire defeats him, presumably for good.

Review:

This series is starting to remind me of... well, imagine if Marvel came out with a series in the mid-1980s, called Stranded Seven or something like that, starring all-new characters. It might be just like this. The problem is, what he's got is not seven all-new characters; he's got existing characters, some with long and proud histories. DeFalco's take on these characters is welcome (if perfunctory) in Gates's case, kind of stupid in Tellus's case, almost offensive in Chameleon Girl's case, and I haven't yet fully judged the other ones. DeFalco doesn't seem to be able to produce that Legion feel in his comics. This would be fine if he was substituting a feel of his own creation, but really it just seems generic.

Can we assume that this past six issues was DeFalco's way of disposing of Nicieza's story elements and transitioning to his own? You'd like to think it wouldn't take six issues, but then, DeFalco did have to deal with The Culling, so I'll give him a pass on it.

This issue is perfectly acceptable superhero action stuff, albeit superhero action stuff without much of a Legion flavour to it, with one perfectly nice moment (Dawnstar: "Why wouldn't we?") and a clever enough ending. I wonder how long it took Wildfire to fly all the way to the sun. Seemed to be only seconds, which seems too fast for Wildfire. I know he and Dawnstar tend to fly through space at the same pace, and Dawny can fly that fast, but I always thought she wasn't really putting the hammer down when Wildfire was with her.

But then there was this. It's something that I hope I would have noticed for myself, but in fact intrepid correspondent Jim pointed it out in the comments to last issue's review: the line "the forgotten armored transport suddenly implodes, bursting outward!" That's just gross. DeFalco's been writing comic books, mostly superhero comic books, for basically forty years now. If he hasn't learned the difference between "implode" and "explode" yet, he's been doing something wrong. Also. Brian Cunningham was the editor on this issue. Why'd he let this go through? Come on, guys; makes you look like idiots.

Next issue, DeFalco gets his chance to do something legitimately useful for Legion lore: modernize Timber Wolf's origin. The original story, with Karth Arn and everything, is an odd and complex one that could stand some updating. Telling the story as it is, only in a more modern style, would probably be difficult, and I have to imagine that DeFalco's going to change some details and get deeper into the characterization. Probably he's going to mix in the animalistic feral wolf stuff too, which I don't like, but it's close to inevitable at this point; not DeFalco's fault. He might even go for an entirely new origin, which... well, let me put it this way. It would have to stand or fall on its own merits, and given what we've seen so far on this series from DeFalco, that's kind of a risky proposition.